A Look At How NFTs Are Revolutionizing The Education Landscape

The nonfungible token (NFT) market has seen quite a few ups and downs since its inception. However, despite being referred to as a fad or financial bubble by several analysts and so-called market pundits, the technology has continued to grow at an impressive rate. As can be seen from the graph below, in spite of the worsening macroeconomic situation — induced largely by the Covid-19 pandemic — the industry has been able to stave off a lot of bearish pressure and expand at a healthy rate.

Past and Projected Growth of the NFT Industry (Source: Statista)

Moreover, there is a plethora of research data indicating that this bullish growth trajectory will continue over the coming decade, with the total market capitalization of this space rising to an impressive $3.42 trillion by 2032 — while exhibiting an impressive CAGR of over 27%. 

NFTs’ growing role in revamping the education system

As real-world use cases surrounding NFTs have continued to grow, these assets have rapidly expanded their scope of utilization across several different domains. For example, they are now being used by the education industry, revolutionizing the way in which knowledge changes hands. Moreover, they are providing content creators with a means of monetizing their data and accessing a completely new digital economy.

To elaborate, NFTs and their underlying technology (i.e. blockchain) are making it possible for educators to not only share their knowledge but also preserve their intellectual property (IP) rights thanks to the use of an immutable, decentralized ledger that makes it impossible third parties of to siphon off one’s proprietary data illegally.

One platform that is at the forefront of this digital revolution is Open Campus, a Web3 ed-tech ecosystem that has been adopted by the leading educational platform TinyTap. It allows professors, teachers, and technologists to communicate with their students as well as earn revenue for their courses by selling them in the form of Publisher NFTs.  As the name suggests,  these assets represent complete ownership of the information contained in them. 

Not only that, Open Campus helps bypass the need for an individual to be affiliated with a school, digital teaching platform, etc, thereby opening up the sector to new entrants. Gabi Klaf is one such freelancer who revamped her career using Tiny Tap and the Open Campus protocol. In a recent interview, she noted: 

“Thanks to Tiny Tap, my course sold at the highest bid, and I was able to earn 130,000 NIS, which was more than I make in a year. From that, I was able to form a business. Today, I work with over 350 institutions with the Department of Education in Israel, and I’ve continued to build my business, English with Gabi, on these foundations.“

These tokens are freely tradable and can be sold/resold across secondary markets while generating substantial monetary incentives for other creators to devise appealing and engaging content. Not only that, they also serve as a means of accruing royalties seamlessly since every trade associated with them is recorded on an immutable database.

Looking ahead

While there is no denying that the NFT market possesses a lot of potential, entry into this space is still difficult for many. For example, several users still find it hard to navigate many of today’s popular platforms — such as OpenSea, Rarible, etc — because their user interfaces (UIs) are complex. 

Not only that, many NFT exchanges still only offer a couple of payment modes (such as crypto), limiting their reach severely. The integration of credit card services can help alleviate this bottleneck. Moreover, the process of minting NFTs is quite uneconomical at present, with many users having to pay exorbitant sums of money to publish their tokens. The integration of layer-2 solutions has been proposed as a solution for such issues.

Therefore, as we move toward an increasingly decentralized future, it will be interesting to see how the NFT market continues to evolve and make its way into diverse markets such as education and learning!